Rivals of Aether 2 has a bad problem of encouraging toxicity and creating negative emotions through a variety of non-gameplay related design choices#389

I love Rivals of Aether 2. It’s my favorite platform fighter ever after 13 years of competing and I can’t sing its prasises enough. I’m very thankful to the development team for creating this beautiful game and I’ve been doing a lot to promote it and help people learn

That being said, I think that Rivals 2 unfortunately has a large problem when it comes to promoting toxicity. Rivals 2 gives its players many ways to communicate with each other through the chat emote system and taunts. However, many of the chat emotes seem to have been created with the intention of being used to aggressively communicate with their oppoent, and some of the taunts have the characters just say downright cruel and offensive things to their opponent

Lets take a look at some of the chat emotes that Rivals 2 lets you send to a stranger online (imgur link because nolt doesn’t let you attach more than one image): https://imgur.com/a/sB71PAp

Keep in mind, the vast majority of the time that you will see these emotes is when you’re interacting with a stranger. I’d imagine, ideally, if you’re wanting your game to succeed, you’d want to foster a welcoming environment that people feel good existing in and want to come back to be a part of. If that is something that you want for your game, how does allowing people to say “Get a job.”, “Skill not found.”, “Try another character”, or any of the other toxic emotes to another player aid in that goal?

What really happens when people see these emotes is they feel mad or upset. Do you want people to be mad or upset when they open your game? Do you want people to receive these messages from strangers and have that be what they remember about your game?

I know people who have quit Rivals of Aether 2 because every time they open it, they run into people who are trying their best to be toxic and aggressive and send emotes like this after or inbetween games.

I have this experience typically at least once a day when I queue into ranked. But many days it happens several times throughout the day. I’ve had back to back games of people being toxic in this way and sending these aggressive emotes. It’s very draining and disheartening, and has made me not want to play at times, and I’m someone who is very passionate about the game, I’ve worked hard to learn it, and I’ve currently pushed my way up to Grandmaster in ranked

Then there are taunts. I don’t think taunts are healthy for a game in general. The very idea of having a button that you can press to say or do something with the intention of making your opponent feel negative emotions is already just something I don’t really understand. Having Loxodant literally say to the other human being you are playing the game with “You’re pathetic.” is insane to me. Rivals of Aether 2 gives you the ability to say, with voice acting, “You’re pathetic.” to a stranger online that you’ve queued with.

I’ve had so many Loxodant players use this taunt after getting the last stock in a match, and then use a toxic emote after the game and leave. I’ve had Loxodant players run away and spam this emote.

This isn’t a good experience. This doesn’t make someone enjoy your game. Instead it makes people not want to play your game, because when they get on they have to put up with people basically harrassing them with these tools that Rivals 2 has given them.

(post continued in comments due to max character count being reached)

All taunts make me feel negative emotions, and then there are more taunts that seem to really want you to feel negative emotions like “Amateur” or the snarky “I’m just warming up”

If you want to do something like taunts, do compliments instead. Have your character say something nice to your opponent. Yeah yeah, I already know what you’re going to say, “But it can be used sarcastically.” Sure. But it’s a lot better than directly insulting people, and I think it would promote more positivity in the game rather than aggressiveness and high negative emotion.

Finally, some of the win dialogue in this game is also pretty toxic and creates negative emotion. Wrastor is the worst offender. When a player loses a match online, there’s a good chance that they may be feeling negative emotions already from just having lost, especially if it is ranked. So then, why, at this moment of increased sensitivity and elevated emotion, do you want to say to your player “Ha ha, you lose!” or the previous “Too easy!”

This is practically begging for your player to be mad while playing your game.

All of this content existing in the game also has an implicit effect of telling players that it is alright to behave in this way. The game says that it is alright to be rude to your opponent, harrass them, and belittle them. The game explicitly designed and created tools to give you specifically for this purpose, so it must be alright. Even Wrastor himself is telling the people that he’s beaten “Ha ha, you lose!” and “Too easy!”, so if he can do it, that must mean that I, as the player, can do that too.

These features promote toxicity both inside and outside of the game, because the game implicitly says that it is alright to act in this way. People who don’t enjoy this kind of behavior leave the game entirely, and you’re creating a space where people who do this kind of behavior and treat people in this negative way feel safe in doing so and they also drive people away from the game.

To finish this post, I leave you with a video example of some of the behavior I encounter daily on this game, enabled by the features I’ve discussed in this post:

AMAZING post. Very well said

The taunt section is perhaps overexaggerated but I agree with the general sentiment. What doubles the feeling is that these interactions usually happen when you’ve just had a frustrating gameplay experience.

Communication can’t effectively be made never negative, but one thing that can be done with it, which Slippi has already implemented, is simply disabling communication outside of matches altogether. You can taunt, but you can’t send or receive messages.

Implementing this would be, in theory, very simple. When you receive a packet with an emote from your opponent, if you have emotes disabled, then it’s just ignored. On their end, they can clog up the chat as much as they’d like, but you never see it. Then, on your end, you simply aren’t able to open the chat window at all, so you never send packets to them. From their end, it seems like you’re just not responding, and from your end, it seems like they’re just never sending.

The drawback here is that you can’t communicate positive or communicative emotes, but I suspect that with a bit of disabling/enabling in the emote menu, similar to favoriting and the on/off for items, it should be possible to get around. For example, a player can choose to disable all emotes. Then, selectively, they can enable the ones they’d like to allow through the filter. If an emote is enabled, it becomes sendable and passes through the filter on your end (so you can filter out any message besides “Good game!” and “Give me a minute” if you want to only see and send those). This could also be made into a preset on the devs’ side, something like allowing players to select “all on,” “all off,” “information only,” or “positive and information only.” Again, the opponent would be welcome to spam insults to their heart’s content, but you’d only see what you care to.

Is this necessary? Probably not. Will it happen? Probably not. But it’s worth considering, for the reasons listed in OP’s posts, and because compounding a frustrating game (it is a frustrating game, let’s be real) with frustrating people is a recipe for demoralization.

easy solution:

I think the game could use some more positive emotes for players to use, and I agree that more sensitive players might benefit from a “disable in-match communication with strangers” toggle so people could simply not see their opponent’s messages.

but beyond that, voice lines and taunts are some of the only ways we get any actual characterization, like with most fighting games. Wrastor is a cocky ace flyer, Loxodont is a fascist dictator, so yeah, their lines might come across as “mean.” The game is called RIVALS of aether, and you’re trying to hit each other with swords and explosions and fire. I don’t think it’s “encouraging” bad behavior to have characters act like they’re in a fighting game

@Phirmth I think there are many, many different ways that you can display a character’s personality other than giving them the ability to call your opponent pathetic on command or by directly insulting the player. It seems obvious to me that taunts, especially ones explicitly saying something rude, would be abused, and in my 2 years of experience playing this game since beta, it has been absued consistently throughout

When it comes to having an option to disable in match chat, there are a few problems. The first problem is that you can’t have positive communication with people using the chat feature anymore.

The next problem with taking the “opt out” approach of expecting people to go into their options and disable it, is that people will experience this kind of dialogue from the chat messages first, see that the game has hand designed toxic messages for you to send to people, and they will think that the game finds this behavior and attitude acceptable and that will encourage them to be toxic both in the game and outside of the game in the community

Next, many people won’t even know that disabling the chat emotes is an option

And finally, by having someone opt out of hearing insulting chat emotes, you are implicitly saying that the person who is upset by receiving this kind of message is the problem, and is in need of some special accommodations, further emphasizing the idea that this kind of message, behavior, and attitude is acceptable and that being upset with it is the “real problem”

When designing a game, I feel like you need to consider how the things you put in the game will be used and experienced by the playerbase, and how these interactions both with the game and other players will make the player feel and if it will lead to them wanting to continue to play the game

I can say that these features have made me feel bad and have made it hard to want to continue playing the game at times. I don’t want to open a game and be insulted by both the game and the players playing it. I want to open the game and have a good time and enjoy the game with other people who like the game and want to have a good time. I know of others who feel the same way

I also believe insults hurt more when they’re personal, and I don’t think insulting a person face to face is equivalent to ingame taunting. You have no information about the other person, about their social status and so on.

@Searing Arrow alright lol. i’m tapping out of this one. this whole conversation is so unserious.

@Reece You’re tapping out without answering any of my questions because you realize if you answer them you will see that I am right

@Searing Arrow get a job

@Reece “You’re pathetic”

Oh wait, sorry, let me get Loxodant to say it

@Reece

@Searing Arrow chills